Burundi

In 2014, WFP-Burundi continued to support the reintegration of Burundian returnees in their communities. This was done through food-for-assets and food-for-training activities bringing together host communities and former refugees returning to Burundi from neighboring countries. In Makamba, a province in eastern Burundi with a high concentration of returnees, people who participated in a WFP food-for-training project can now earn a living.

WFP is implementing an innovative pilot voucher project in three refugee camps in Burundi with a view to replacing the traditional general food distribution method of providing assistance to refugees in camps.

After nearly two decades spent in exile in Tanzania, thousands of Burundian refugees are finally returning home. WFP food is helping them make the transition and restart lives uprooted by civil war in Burundi in the 1990s.

Some of the Burundian refugees whose families fled the country in 1972 do not know where in Burundi they came from. When they repatriate, they are hosted in integrated rural villages set up by the government where they begin a new life from scratch. WFP provides food assistance to help them get a good start. Elysée Mbonye is one of them.

More than 810 children have been born in Burundian refugee camps since 2010. WFP supplies much needed food assistance to these children as well as to 20,000 Congolese refugees who have sought asylum in Burundi.

WFP is taking advantage of Burundi's new wireless network to ensure it always knows how people are eating, how much they pay for food and where potential pockets of hunger are developing. Staff on fact-finding missions update the central database with palm computers.